ABSTRACT
This paper reads Boots Riley’s 2018 film Sorry to Bother You as an Afrofuturist text that imagines the possibility for Black, disabled revolt against capitalist structures. Drawing on Jasbir Puar’s notion of debilitation as a structural process targeting the most marginalized populations, Rhya M. Moffitt considers how the Black bodies in the film are manipulated for productivity. Because of this transmogrification, she argues in this chapter that the film literalizes a possibility of what it means to take up Sylvia Wynter’s notion of abandonment of the category of the Human. This literalization imagines a future in which Blackness and disability persist in a different form.
